Sunday, March 23, 2014

5 Days of Decluttering Starts Tomorrow!

As I've mentioned in an earlier post, I have been loving being home with my babies for the last 4 months (has it really been that long?!). During that time, when I haven't been feeding, changing, burping, or cuddling a baby, I've been spending a great deal of time organizing our home. We have lived in our house for over 4 years, and for that entire time I've always had a full time job (which I'm very thankful for). On my days off, I really only focused on things that needed to be done right then (i.e. regular cleaning chores and other day to day tasks). It wasn't until I was off work for a significant amount of time that I started noticing what things were working around the house, and perhaps more importantly, what things weren't. And everywhere I looked, one big thing I kept noticing was all of our STUFF. And I'm not talking about baby stuff. That's a whole other category of "stuff". I'm just talking about stuff that Hubby and I brought into the house when we moved in together. Stuff that we just put somewhere because there was an empty space, without giving much thought as to whether we really loved or needed it. We had just always had it, so we would just continue having it.

Well, over the last several weeks, I've done a good amount of decluttering. I went through our cleaning supplies, reorganized and pared down our master bedroom closet, cleaned out under our downstairs bathroom sink, purged the pantry, and went through our closet under the stairs (scary!). I would say most of our main living areas are fairly organized (emphasis on fairly) and really only house those things we truly love and use. However, there are areas that I haven't gotten to, mainly because we don't spend much time in them: our downstairs spare bedroom, our upstairs spare bedroom, some drawers and cabinets both in our kitchen and family room (you know, the ones you don't really go in unless you're looking for that one specific thing), and some other random areas (do I dare venture into the garage??). And it turns out, this week is a great week to tackle these areas. Why? On Monday, March 31st, a local non-profit will be coming around to houses picking up donations. This means no loading up the car, packing up the babies, driving to Goodwill, unloading the car, and then driving back home. I just take everything out the curb, stick a sign on it, and it's as good as gone.

So this is the week to really get down to the nitty gritty and go through those random spaces once and for all. I'll post an update each day along with some before and after pics. I'd love for you to join in, or just read along. It's always more fun doing things with friends. :) See you tomorrow!